I’ve discovered over the last several weeks as friends have announced their pregnancies that I’m a bit resentful towards those who “just get pregnant.” I’m going to have to start being careful to not let that resentment color how I treat them or think about them. It’s an ugly thing, really, but it pops up when I least expect it. It seems that we hear of someone from our church or someone in our larger circle of people getting pregnant almost every week. When we were struggling to get pregnant, those announcements stung, of course. I figured that stinging might go away if we ever got pregnant, but I’m finding that pregnancy doesn’t automatically make the pain of infertility go away. The fact that people continue to “just get pregnant” when it took us so long, really bothers me, and I understand that it shouldn’t. I’m sure I’ll get over it at some point. I have a firm grasp on the idea that God has us all on different paths and no one’s journey is the same–I understand all that and I’m fine with it. But the ease of most people’s pregnancies still stings. In the last week or so, I’ve had two friends announce their pregnancies–one with her third child, and one with her second. With both of them, that ugly part of me thought, “Wait a minute, I just got pregnant after a really long time of trying and it’s a big deal. Why are you here announcing that you’re pregnant after deciding when you wanted to have a baby, doing the deed, and peeing on a stick?” See? U-G-L-Y.

Another part of it is that I sort of feel like an imposter. My church is mostly made up of couples in their upper 20s to upper 30s, most with multiple small children. Over the past 2 years when we were trying to get pregnant, I can’t even begin to figure out how many kids were born. So many that I had to stop looking at people in the communion line because of all the big bellies. And now I’ve “crossed over”–I’m one of the ones who will (assuming everything continues to go smoothly) have a big belly one day, but I don’t feel like I belong at all. It’s like there’s an invisible wall between the girls with kids and the ones without. Or come to think of it, maybe I’m the only one on the other side of that wall…and I know I’m the one who put myself there. No one did anything to make me feel like I’m on the other side, but after having seen so many of my peers have their first, then second, child while we still struggled, the wall definitely crept up for me. Even when I’m holding a baby in my arms, I’m not sure I’ll feel like I belong on that other side of the wall. Like I’ll still feel like I’m not up to par with the ones who got pregnant easily and never knew any burden in that regard.